


The Girl Of My Dreams Is Giving Me Nightmares

by wily_one24



Category: Once Upon a Time (TV)
Genre: F/F, another confusing fic jacqui?, jacqui continues her streak of writing swan queen fics with song titles, post second curse, why yes i believe it is
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-12-29
Updated: 2014-03-14
Packaged: 2018-01-06 13:19:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 6,524
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1107332
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wily_one24/pseuds/wily_one24
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The world is a stage and she's on the wrong one.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Post mid-season three finale, so spoilers abound if you haven't seen that. 
> 
> 1\. The theory abounds that Regina gave Emma all of her own memories regarding bb Henry.   
> 2\. When Emma and Regina's magic combine, it is often unpredictable and powerful beyond measure. 
> 
> This is what happens when those factors combine and Emma is left with an entire cache of Regina's memories and thoughts and fantasies. 
> 
> This is Swan Queen, it will get there, I promise.

** THE GIRL OF MY DREAMS IS GIVING ME NIGHTMARES **

*~*~*~*

Emma has an imaginary friend and she hates her. 

Not an imaginary friend, really, more like a voice in her head that she heard once. 

But once was enough. 

Her calves ache and her arms are about to drop off and that’s nothing compared to her ears, which have begun their own form of screaming. Her breath is shallow and quick and she has to grit her teeth to remind herself that slow, deep breaths are needed to calm down. 

“C’mon.” It’s a plea, desperate and broken and very near tears. “C’mon kid, please, please, please.”

But he doesn’t listen and his tiny little lungs are ceaseless, his body rigid and angry in her grasp. 

“I know, I know.” 

It comes out cooed, like she understands. Which she doesn’t, but the baby is only three months old, there’s no way he could know she’s lying. But he _does_ , somehow he does. He can feel it in every fibre of his brand new frame and he’s protesting loudly. 

“I know I’m awful, I know, but I’m trying, kid, please.” 

He’s dry; she’s opened his diaper eight times in the last half hour just to check. He’s not hungry; she’s shoved bottle after bottle in his mouth to see if that worked to the point where he screwed his face and turned his head so she couldn’t even get the teat near his mouth anymore. She’s tried putting him to sleep, but when she lets go of the little wrapped bundle in his cot, he cries even louder. 

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry.” She kisses the words to his tiny, red, wrinkled forehead and rocks him gently. “I’m trying, I don’t know what to do.”

She is lost, she is unprepared, she is not a mother and he is suffering for it. 

And she despises that imaginary voice in her head that told her she could be. 

It came to her fully formed and authoritative as she lay in that sparse hospital bed, gripping the rails and the chain of the ankle cuff rattling against her bones, as she strained her neck to look as far from him as possible. 

_You need to take him._ It said. _A good life. You and Henry would have always been together._

And the minute Emma had held him, she’d thanked the voice and cried and maybe it had been the drugs they’d given her or the euphoria of childbirth, but she had not only agreed to keep him like the voice had said, she’d even named him Henry. 

Maybe it’s not an imaginary friend, maybe she’s developing schizophrenia. 

If the voice ever comes back and tells her to start killing the neighbour’s dog; she’s definitely going to see the doctor. 

“Where are you?” She cries instead, red eyed and sucked into hysteria. “Why did you want me to have this kid when I’m no good at it!?!?”

And the baby continues to scream. 

It had seemed like a dream come true, at first, everything had fallen into place. A little too easily, it seemed, and Emma’s trust issues had been sorely tempted, but she would never look a gift horse in the mouth. 

A social worker had jumped on her case, diligent and enthusiastic, she’d pushed for Emma’s early parole, organised a good family for Henry in the meantime, set Emma up with work training and organised both a job and an apartment upon her release. In the three months that took, Emma had been thrown from one class to another: parenting, nutrition, first aid. And she’d taken them all eagerly, wanting nothing but the best for the boy who was brought to see her three times a week. 

“Shh, shh, shh.” It’s a mantra, tears burning the corners of her eyes. “Shh, baby, shh, c’mon.”

Tonight is her fourth night in the apartment and her very first night alone with Henry. 

Tomorrow a social worker will visit and she knows they’ll take one look at him and scoop him up, take away all her papers and declare the whole thing a giant mistake. 

Not one thing in those parenting classes prepared her for this. They’d made her diaper a plastic doll, prepare powdered formula in sterilised bottles, told her about what ages to expect rolling and crawling and what to do when the baby is ready for solid foods. Gave them child friendly scissors, craft paper and crayons and lectured them about age appropriate activities. 

But this child is not in any book and he is loud and inconsolable. 

They’d given her a robot baby that cried at random intervals and she had to turn a key in its back and rock it for ten minutes to get it to stop. She had to feed it a pretend bottle and carry it around for a designated amount of time per day or it would cry more. A little computer chip monitored its temperature, any rough movements or loud noises. 

She had the doll twenty four hours before her cellmate Sherilee had grabbed the crying doll Emma had been rocking, turned the thing over, pulled open the battery pack and jiggled the wires. The crying had stopped immediately and Emma had felt relief for exactly two minutes before the guilt set in. 

“I want to do this right.” She’d declared. “When I get out, my baby won’t have batteries.”

But Sherilee had rolled her eyes. 

“He ain’t gonna be a robot, neither. He’s not gonna have a key to turn, he won’t cry for set periods of time and then stop. What they don’t tell you is that kids are messy and sometimes they cry for no reason and sometimes they don’t stop crying and sometimes they shit all over you. But when you get outta here and you live with that baby, you will get to know him and there will be some little trick you’ll figure out, just for him, that will work most of the time. All babies are different.”

Sherilee had been thirty eight and had pictures of four different kids. 

“My eldest boy, he liked to be swung, one side to the other, large ones. Used to make me dizzy, but it soothed him right up. My second eldest would scream and nothing would calm her down. Until one day I put her up over my shoulder and she just stopped crying, every time she got upset she would just lay over my shoulder like it was a log, little head hanging down my back. Funny thing.”

Emma is beginning to think Sherilee was full of shit. Henry doesn’t have a thing, she has tried rocking him and singing to him and being calm and just leaving him in the cot and walking away, but nothing. 

And then Emma sighs. 

She hefts him up over to the right, hand on the warm cradle at the back of his head, and pushes his small little tummy against her shoulder. 

The child lets out the loudest belch Emma has ever heard from someone sober, let alone so little, and then something magic happens. He stops crying instantly, like a switch being flipped, gives a contented little sound that is almost a laugh, and goes completely soft and limp in her hands. 

He curls up around the angle of her collarbone and falls asleep with warm breath puffing out against her neck. 

Emma laughs out loud. She laughs and laughs and laughs, the tears streaming down her cheek turned happy. For about five seconds, until she remembers that the child she is holding is sleeping and if he begins to cry again, she’ll end up crying with him. 

Okay voice, she thinks, you got me. 

***

Her life is perfect, her life is beautiful. 

She’s had some ups and downs, but compared to life before Henry, this is paradise. She gets a job that she’s fairly good in and it leads to another job she’s better at, which leads to a better apartment and a feeling of security. It all leads to a chain reaction that feels like a ladder of steps up, unbelievable and gorgeous and lovely. 

Her son loves her, unlike anyone and anything else in her entire life. 

And she loves him, wholly and completely and without reserve. 

It’s freeing in a way. At first she was scared and stand offish and reserved, but that all disappeared when she found herself giggling with a ten month old on the floor, when she rolled on the carpet with her two year old. 

She never ever wants him to feel as if he has to hold in the laughter that bubbles up in his chest, so she forces herself to free hers as well, forces it until it begins to feel natural to laugh out loud, to sing in the kitchen as they make dinner. 

All the big things in her life turn small. The gaping, aching hole she has always felt whenever she thought about who left her by the side of the road and why disappears. Her hand brushes the wispy hairs at the back of Henry’s neck, her brain automatically sorting through her calendar for a day suitable to book him in for a haircut, and she knows that _she_ is a mommy, _she_ is a parent, and nobody that leaves an infant helpless in the woods can ever compare. 

She does not need them, she needs Henry and he needs her and they make popcorn in the microwave, chicken cacciatore in the oven, pancakes in the griddle, and laughter everywhere.

The voice doesn’t come back for eleven years and though Emma never forgets it, never mistakes it for her own internal one; it drifts to the back of her mind like a foggy memory. 

***

Their road trip up the Eastern Seaboard changes everything.

And not for the better. 

Driving back the car is quiet and even though Henry smiles at her, in response to her own, there is a feeling of drifting in between them, a hazy listlessness that confuses them both. 

She opens the apartment door reluctantly, feeling stupid for feeling relieved that everything _is_ where it should be. Henry puts his bags away in his room and doesn’t come out until she calls him for dinner. 

That night, Emma dreams of smoke and lights and fear and sadness and wakes crying without knowing why. 

***

“Mom?” 

Henry comes out in the morning, bleary eyed and hair tousled, surprised to see her up before him. 

“Hey kid.” She can feel the corners of her eyes soften just looking at him, eyes sweeping over his form more familiar to her than her own. “Couldn’t sleep.”

His eyebrow arches, but he doesn’t question her further as he pads into the kitchen and brings out a bowl of cereal. They cook together on the weekends, but they’ve just gotten back and he has school this morning. 

Which means she has work, which means she has to get into the shower and dress sometime before she really wants to wake her limbs up from where they’re frozen in the window box behind Henry’s plants. 

The fingers of her left hand sweep over, again and again and for the hundredth time though she won’t tell him that, the finely developed biceps of her right arm. She doesn’t have a sedentary job, by any means, but she suddenly cannot explain the muscles that pop up defined and strong. 

She doesn’t understand why this bothers her so much, when it is the same body she had yesterday. 

***

Emma dreams of green, green grass and a hedge taller than herself. She dreams of swinging toddler Henry high in her arms in a backyard she has never seen with an apple tree in the middle. 

She dreams of fear and doubt and prayers she has never said. 

***

“Mom?” His voice has lost the surprise at finding her awake, staring listlessly at nothing for third week in a row. “You’d tell me if something was wrong, right?”

Nothing is wrong, but it sure feels like it. 

“You’d tell me if I was going crazy?” She asks him instead. “Right?”

He only grins and pokes out his tongue as he pours milk into his bowl, rolling his eyes at her like the teen he is too fast becoming. 

***

Emma wakes screaming, a dry throated wail, her limbs twisting in sweat sodden sheets. 

The lights burst on, blinding her for a second, until she sees a breathless and scared looking Henry at her door, fingers hovering over the switch. 

“Are you okay?” 

He gasps it, worried and slightly scared. 

Emma can only shake her head. 

Soft, gentle footsteps approach her bed and she watches the gangly awkwardness of her son in a growth spurt sit on the edge of her mattress, feels it dip down to the left. His voice is care-worn and worried, whispered, as he asks his next question. 

“Who’s Daniel?” 

***

Emma is scared to go to sleep. 

She drinks more coffee than ever before. She watches late night infomercials and considers buying hundreds of dollars of flavorstone cookware for her kitchen. She lathers concealer and foundation on her face to hide the bruise coloured bags under her eyes. 

Her hands shake as she tries to type out her paperwork. 

She yawns all the way through dinner and Henry frowns at her. 

As a last resort, she eyes the sleeping tablets warily and then throws two of them back with a glass of water before falling into bed. 

***

The drugs only make it harder for her to wake up, so when she finally does, Emma is near hysterical. 

She is panting and breathless and red faced with the effort of doing something, or resisting something that waivers at the edges of her conscious but doesn’t break through. Her dream is already slipping away from her, faster than she can recall it, but something nags at her, rattles her, screams at her to remember. 

They make waffles and then pour syrup into the grooves across from each other at the small table. 

“Mom?” Quiet and hesitant and worried, he watches her carefully. “Did you…?”

The pause in his question makes her look up, makes her scrutinize him a little bit more. 

“Mmm?”

It’s an encouragement, a nod for him to continue, and he looks reluctant in a way she has never seen him before. 

“Did you dream about my dad?”

It makes her gasp and the fork falls out of her hand, clinking loudly in the silence that follows. 

“What? No… I mean, what? Why?”

She is stumbling and groundless and unprepared for this. The subject has come up, perhaps, once or twice before when he was younger. Her response was always the same: that the man who donated the sperm was shiftless and untrustworthy and in no way a father. 

He doesn’t meet her eyes. 

“It’s just… you were talking in your sleep again and you were saying stuff. Like, like you were arguing with someone.”

Curiosity floods her, the drive to know, to chase down the truth and win, it’s what fuels her work and she is helpless to stop it. She has to know, because the dreams are haunting her, even if she can’t remember them, and something solid in her tells her that they’re definitely not about Neal, wherever he might be. 

“Was I?”

“Yeah.” He nodded, eyes focused entirely on his plate as if he was ashamed. “You were saying things like, ‘no, he’s _my_ son’. I thought… I thought…”

A gulp, a hesitation, and Emma’s heart pulses for the reluctant hope in his voice. 

“I thought maybe… maybe he’d been around when I was little and you fought over me or something, that maybe…”

It hurts, like the echoes of her childhood. That maybe his father might have wanted him once, is what Henry is trying so hard not to say, that even though he loves her and she loves him and they are happy together, the empty space left by a missing parent will never be filled. 

“No.” She hates to tell him, to be the one, but she can’t dangle that hope in him forever. “Henry, no. He left me in jail, doing his time, and that’s where I had you. He doesn’t even know you exist.”

His bowed head is painful for them both. 

“Yeah.” It comes out like a grumble. “I know.”

***

It’s a slow progression, so slow she barely notices it over four months, but one morning after Henry has handed her the usual glass of water and aspirin, brewed a perfect cup of coffee in her favourite mug and slathered her toast with jelly, Emma realises he is turning into her carer. 

She is the mother, she is supposed to be the nurturing one, yet it is Henry who has taken it upon himself to look after her. 

The guilt eats away at her long enough to forget the brunette hair and piercing eyes that had lingered in her waking memory. 

***

“I’m starting to remember.” She says one night, the both of them bundled into thick woolly sweaters and standing at their window, eyes glued to the spectacular light show outside counting down another year. “The dreams.”

He frowns, the bursts of red and green and yellows reflected on his face. 

“I think you should see someone, Mom.”

Emma bites the frustration out on her upper lip. 

“It’s not normal.” He persists. “I’m getting really worried.”

Not now, she wants to say, not when that woman is teasing at the edges of her brain, so close and yet so far. Emma knows her, Emma should know her, if Emma can only remember one of her dreams, she is sure she would know her. 

“I think she rode horses.”

There is something there, the heavy snuff of an animal, the heat of fur, the solidness of flesh under hers, the strong and steady beat of a heart under her hands, the earthy smell of it. The feel of wind and power and strong muscles under her thighs as she flies. 

“I think sometimes I’m her.”

Henry turns his head to study her, the colours exploding on both their faces. 

“I think you need to get some real sleep.”

***

Henry is scribbling math problems in his workbook across the desk from her, she can see him around the shell of her laptop, his tongue poking out the corner of his mouth in intense concentration. She tears a corner from the notepad in front of her, screws it up, and flicks it at his head. 

He rolls his eyes good naturedly as he looks at her. 

“What?”

“I think I killed an entire village last night.”

She says it jokingly, but there’s an edge there. She wants him to tell her just how crazy that entire idea is, how insane, so she can finally shake the horror of it, the totality she’d woken up with. 

“Geez, Mom, a village? That’s what you’re going with?” The eye roll deepens. “No more M. Night. Shimmy Sham for you.”

He’s perfect. Emma’s nerves finally settle down and she can grin at the absurdity of it. 

Another little ball of paper sails across the table and this one bounces off his left ear. He sighs deeply before looking up. 

“I killed them because they wouldn’t tell me where Snow White was.”

He looks her dead in the eye for a count of eight seconds. 

“Maybe stay off the sleeping tablets too, okay, Mom?”

***

_She is sitting at a desk, filling out paperwork, and she can see her hands in front of her, nails painted a dark, perfect, blood red._

_The sudden sound of a small engine rises in her ears, the screech of metal and wood, and she knows, feels it in the simultaneous sinking and wakening of her heart, that it is somehow that infernal woman. Everything is her. Her dress slides across her hips as she stalks down the steps and out the door._

_Across the perfectly maintained grass and right into the woman’s ruddy, accomplished glow filled face._

_“Just what do you think you’re doing?”_

_Her eyes slide down and up, taking in everything, the arms, the slight sheen of sweat across healthy sun kissed skin, the crumpled white tank straining against muscles, the power tool, the unruly blonde hair, the dance of light in her eyes._

_“Picking apples.”_

_She licks her lips, this woman she isn’t, and glares at the woman she is._

_“You’re out of your mind.”_

_“No, you are if you think a shoddy frame job’s enough to scare me off.”_

_It’s electrifying, the closeness, the defiance that mirrors in those eyes, that sparks off bounces between them._

_“You’re going to have to do better than that.” The words keep coming and she should break them up, but she is drawn helplessly and incontrovertibly to them. “If you come after me one more time, I’m coming back for the rest of this tree. Because, sister, you have no idea what I’m capable of.”_

_The air crackles between them and she can’t stop looking at the mouth, twisted up in spite and anger and a little bit of lust._

_“Your move.”_

_It’s those last two words that get her, that challenge, because she never ever backs down from a challenge._

_She reaches out and grabs the wrist of the woman walking away, turns her around and pushes her against the tree, pushes her stocking clad knee between the jeans and thrusts._

_They both moan._

_And that’s only the beginning._

Emma wakes sweating and flushed. 

And very, very confused. 

She has gotten used to being someone other than herself in her dreams, in the fantastical nightmares that haunt her relentlessly. She has even gotten used to the fact that the person she becomes belongs to that voice from so long ago. 

The name lingers in her brain, teases it, dances along the edges of her meninges and through her cerebellum. 

_Regina_. 

She knows the dream world the woman lives in, the magic and the terror and the anger and the battles and wars waged, fantastical creatures that resemble Grimm more than Disney. 

What Emma is not prepared for are the dreams of being that woman in a small town, leading an average life, in a house Emma knows she has never seen, surrounded by mementos of Henry. 

And she is _really_ unprepared to be this woman, watching Emma walk up the pathway. 

It is bizarre to see herself from the point of view of someone else. Strange and beguiling and awkward. As the woman, she is nervous and fearful and annoyed and angry and terrified and desperate, and more than just a little bit attracted to the Emma that is not her. 

What she is absolutely and completely not prepared for, is the dream of watching her own body, the Emma that is not her, attack an apple tree with a chainsaw and confronting her in the garden, body and nerves alight. 

There is something inherently awkward about being someone else pushing her own body against the tree and…

Emma wakes up sweating and flushed and slightly turned on and definitely confused. 

***

Henry packs his school bag with expert precision, lining up the homework from the night before as Emma makes sandwiches piled high with tomatoes and lettuce and carrots. 

“I think I made out with myself last night.”

Henry throws a pen at her. 

“That’s gross, Mom. Can you stick with the mass murder, please? I think I’ll need less therapy that way.”

Emma pokes out her tongue. 

“On a more serious note… did you ever take me to a really attractive woman’s house at night? That I somehow just can’t remember?”

He grabs an apple from the fruit basket and gives her yet another monumental eye roll. 

“Since when have you needed me to pick up women? Honestly.”

***

“I don’t have friends.” 

It’s less a conversation and more thinking out loud, but Henry looks up anyway. 

“Do you realise that, Henry? I don’t… talk to anyone.”

The space between his brows furrows into a little groove. 

“You have me.”

She wants to smile and agree, because Henry is enough and he has always been enough, but there’s a nagging feeling in her chest, an empty pit of nothingness that yearns for something she doesn’t even understand. 

“Don’t you ever feel… like… I don’t know.”

Like the world is a stage and she’s on the wrong one. 

“That there’s more?”

His head quirks to the side. 

“More than what?”

In her dreams, she’s been on flying ships and handled swords and thrown fireballs with her hands, she thinks she stopped the moon once, she’s walked castles and rode horses and danced with royalty and eaten feasts of unimaginable animals, worn clothes unheard of and created magic with her hands. 

She has talked to people and loved them and hated them and tried to kill them and tried to love them, been hurt by them and hated by them and everything, everything tastes better in her dreams, looks more vibrant, feels more alive. 

And here she wakes in the morning and eats breakfast with her son, goes to work and comes home to eat dinner with him and she loves him, she always has and always will, but she cannot taste anything here. 

“I don’t know.” She sighs. “I don’t… know.”

***

...TBC...


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> __
> 
> He looks at her then, more closely, and suddenly she can see herself in his eyes. Unkempt, messy hair, bleary eyes, manic expression, shoeless and barefoot, nightshirt hanging off her shoulder. She is wild and untamed and senseless. 
> 
> And frightening. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  **A/N:** Okay, so, obviously given the latest episode, everything that happens here is non-canon. Wildly off canon. AU. Nothing like the series at all. So sue me. Well, okay, don't... you won't get much. 
> 
> Also, the fun begins in the next chapter!

***

Emma wakes with the kitchen tile cold against her bare toes. 

She blinks, trying to wash away the fugue of sleep, trying to remember where she is and why. It’s her kitchen, that much is obvious, but it is strange to wake up in the middle of it, surrounded by dishes and delicious smells and flour coating her hands.

“Oh, hey!” Henry comes out before she can even form a solid thought. “Breakfast!”

He has his hand to his mouth before she can even make sense of it, before a panic white hot and senseless throws her body on autopilot over the counter and her hand slaps the pastry from his grasp. 

Wide eyed, mouth gaping, Henry watches it skid across the floor. 

“Don’t eat that!” She hisses, panic oozing into more confusion that bleeds into frustration and all of it without explanation. “Don’t ever eat that!”

He looks at her then, more closely, and suddenly she can see herself in his eyes. Unkempt, messy hair, bleary eyes, manic expression, shoeless and barefoot, nightshirt hanging off her shoulder. She is wild and untamed and senseless. 

And frightening. 

Emma forces her breathing back to normal and sits down on a breakfast stool. 

“I’m sorry.” It comes out soft and penitent. “I’m sorry, kid. I’ll make you something decent.”

But he is not soothed. 

“You dreamed again, didn’t you?”

“It’s okay.” But the words are rote and meaningless. They have been for a while now. “I’m fine.”

“No, you’re not.”

He’s firm, serious, already grown up and handling things better than she is. 

“No, I’m not.”

***

Her therapist writes her a prescription. 

Her therapist tells her that she’s dealing with the stress of turning thirty by projecting youthful fairy tales into her subconscious. 

Her therapist thinks she’s burdening Henry with problems that far outweigh his age. 

Emma thinks her therapist is full of shit. 

She throws the little bottle of pills into the back of the medicine cabinet, up high, behind the Midol and tampons where Henry will never look. She _has_ no real stress about turning thirty, certainly not enough that she can really point to for such a sudden and total change in her emotional well-being. 

When she looks in the mirror she can see herself, see the lines of age on her face, well-worn creases that show the worries of her youth and the laughter of her adulthood, the joys and worry of a parent. The map of her face is a life well lived and well earned. 

But the face in the mirror is dull, she is dull, compared to the way she is seen in her dreams. 

“Mom?” Comes the call from the hallway. “Have you seen my blazer for school?”

“On the back of the chair!”

She doesn’t even have to think about the answer. 

“Not there!”

Her eyes close and she inhales. 

“Look again.” The words come easy and practiced and automatic. “Look harder.”

A pause. 

“Oh! Thanks!”

Emma stares ahead at the mirror and reaches out, her fingers stopping just short of touching the glass. 

She is a mother, ~~_a beloved daughter_~~ , a high school dropout turned successful detective, ~~_a town sheriff_~~ , an ex-con, ~~_a saviour_~~. She has a son, ~~_parents, friends, a community, a town_~~. 

She is scared that her dream life is preferable to her real one. 

And it’s not even hers. 

“You ready?”

Henry’s face twists around the door, head poking in, and his eyes are wide and way too innocent, she can see the shrewdness in his gaze, the scrutiny. If nothing else, she won’t bother him anymore. She snaps the makeup case closed and turns with a smile. 

“Absolutely.”

***

She lies in her bed, a sham and a failure. 

When the footsteps come close and she hears the creak of her door, Emma goes still curled up under the blanket, forces her breath steady like nothing has changed in the last twenty years. 

“Mom?” It’s a whisper, a hesitant little test. “You awake?”

Emma makes indistinct snuffling noises and waits for the footsteps to disappear again. 

She’s not asleep, but she won’t burden him anymore. 

***

Emma knows the woman in her dreams. 

She doesn’t know her full name or where she lives or how she knows her, but she knows. Somehow, some way, Emma knows her. 

Google is absolutely no help at all, not that she thought it would be. There are simultaneously too many Reginas in New York and not enough at the same time. None of them are her Regina. And she’s not even sure if the woman is from New York to begin with. 

She has no real talent for drawing, but she finds herself sketching the face anyway, getting lost in scratching pencil nibs across blank white pages, relentlessly, and then throwing them out. Not one of the shaky, ill shaded faces look like her Regina. 

Her Regina. 

That’s how she sees it in her head now. 

This alien and separate and complete woman in her brain. She’s not a figment of Emma’s imagination, or a subconscious stand in for someone or something else. She is somebody. And after visiting her nightly, after walking in her shoes and feeling her, being her, dressing her, speaking as her, she belongs to Emma.

***

“Mom?” 

It’s too quick and too sudden to hide and Emma bites her lip. 

“Mom, are you crying?”

“No.” She shakes her head, but her voice cracks, gives her away in the worst possible way. “I’m not, I just… I’m sorry.”

Emma scrunches another tissue in her fist, tossing it into the pile next to her on the sofa. It’s automatic to reach for another one and she blows her nose in the dim blueish light that her laptop gives out in the pitch darkness of the room. 

Henry frowns as he walks closer, gangly and tall and outgrowing this set of pajamas, his bare toes smooshing into the carpet. He reaches out for her laptop and she only thinks for a second of slamming it shut before she releases it and watches his face as he turns the screen around. 

“Are you…?” It’s puzzlement on his face, disbelief and only just a fraction of teen boy mocking. “Are you crying to an old Disney movie?”

She nods her head, snuffling into the tissue. 

“Why?”

But as Snow White lays in her glass coffin, Emma can only shrug her shoulders. 

She has no idea. 

***

Henry comes home from school and stops to see her at the table, papers strewn around the laptop.

“Did you go to work today?”

Emma shakes her head, barely looks up as she scribbles something else on the notebook in front of her. 

“Mom?”

She loves him, she adores him, but irritation flares at the interruption, at the nagging. 

“I’m researching, Henry.”

His school bag slides to the floor, dropping from his fingers forgotten and any normal day she would remind him to pick it up and put it away, but she hasn’t even brushed her hair, so the small things are definitely going by the wayside. 

“Researching what?”

That’s a good question. She barely even knows. Small towns in Maine and none of them the right one. She has maps spread out on the table, red felt tip markers that trace the coast line again and again, claiming towns and comparing them to online maps. 

And somewhere, somewhere deep and frustrating in her memory, there should be one more. 

There should be a town along the coast, with a harbour, with grey cement and a bench to sit and watch the waves, with a lighthouse and a shoddy wooden playground. It’s there, it’s there she knows it, but none of the maps show it. 

“I don’t…”

And Henry sighs. 

“You don’t know. Yeah, I get it.”

***

He is shaking her awake and for a split second, Emma’s hand grabs his wrist so hard he actually winces. 

“Mom.” She relaxes her hand, but that’s the only thing, her entire body is rigid and sweating and on fire, her breathing rapid and her eyes bloodshot and blown. “You were screaming.”

She cannot catch a breath, chest jumping up and down in shallow rapid movements, even as her eyes slide down to the reddened skin she’d left on her son. 

“The… the…”

Her terror is frightening him and she wants, god how she _wants_ to soothe him, but all she can do is draw her knees up to her chest and wrap her arms around them, hugging herself close and never letting go. 

“.. the king.”

***

Therapist number two decides to put her under hypnosis. 

Therapist number two wants to put her on a fuckton of drugs, therapy and hospitalisation after the hypnosis session. 

She doesn’t go back. 

***

There’s a red jacket in the back of her closet. 

She stares at it, confused, disbelieving, mind blanked out with little sleep and too much adrenaline. Just a little bit wistful. 

“Why do I have this?”

It’s a rhetorical question, but it’s answered anyway. 

“I have never seen you wear that.” Henry’s nose wrinkles slightly as he studies the leather. “Is it a throwback from your juvie days?”

Emma nudges him with her shoulder and he nudges back. But her brain refuses to be silent. It’s not from her youth, even if she had been able to afford something like that, she was much smaller then, in stature and in personality. 

No, the jacket is from some time much more recent. 

It’s not in her memories, but it is in her dreams. 

***

There’s a knock on their door one morning and Henry looks at her, confused. 

But nowhere near as confused as Emma when she sees what’s behind the door. He looks like an escaped mental patient that wants to be Jack Sparrow with a hangover. He knows her name and he claims to know her family. 

It’s insane. It’s what horror movies are made of right before the serial killer hones into his next victim. All her instincts _should_ be screaming at her to save Henry, slam the door shut, grab her gun and call the police. 

Most of them are saying exactly that, but not all. 

There’s a part of her, a small tired, sleepless part of her that wants to listen, that wants him to have the answers that have eluded her for months. For a year. 

A small part that gets shoved right down the second he grabs her and tries to force his lips on her. Then the rest of her instincts take over and she knees him in the balls and slams the door. 

“Who was that?”

“No idea.” Emma shakes her head, tries to clear the fugue that has descended. “Someone must have left the door open downstairs.”

Certainly not a pirate wannabe who might have answers she so desperately needs. 

***

That night Emma dreams of flying ships.

Losing Henry. 

Peter Pan and Tinkerbelle. 

And Captain Hook. 

***

She waits until Henry goes to school. 

She’s not entirely sure she has a job anymore. She’s not entirely sure she cares one way or the other. 

What she cares about is searching the halls of her apartment building, walking a radius of a few blocks around, asking the doorman. Looking for a man that didn’t exist twenty four hours ago and doesn’t seem to exist now. 

Emma gets her break when she begins calling local police stations asking after poor cousin Jarod who suffers schizophrenia and believes he’s a fairy tale character. It takes a lot of fast talking, but this is not her first rodeo. She’s done more than her fair share of lying to get the results she wants. 

And then finally he’s there. 

He saunters out of the station with a cocky expression and she considers putting him back in. Instead she walks away, knowing he’s going to follow, until they get to a side alley and she turns around to really look at him. This man from her dreams. 

The dreams that should not be real. 

“Finally come to your senses, Love?”

But she’s not there to play his games and he’s not prepared to be shoved hard against a brick wall with an arm across his throat. 

“Who are you?” She hisses. “Tell me who you are.”

He doesn’t struggle and his body eases into the contact, relaxes between her arm and the brick, before he licks his lips a little.

“Not the right the question.”

She could kill him right now, has the strangest urge to do just that, but settles for pressing a little bit harder. Her brain stutters for a moment, before she blinks and asks again. 

“Who am I?”

***

“No.” Her words come out dazed, confused, and adamant. And completely at odds with her brain. “That’s bullshit. That’s complete utter bullshit.”

That goddamn fucking eyebrow cocks again and she swears she is just going to slap him if he keeps doing that. The fact that he remains calm and more so, slightly amused, adds to her frustration, makes her hackles rise. 

“You have lost your mind.” She spits, pacing the floor of her apartment. “You’re crazy, you’re demented.”

The only thing he gives her is a shrug. 

“Maybe. Doesn’t change the facts, though, Love.”

It earns him a glare, not his first and she suspects not his last. 

“Call me Love one more time, I dare you.”

And he has the audacity to chuckle. 

“Some things never change, no matter what Regina did to your brain.”

She stops. Stops everything. Stops pacing, stops breathing, stops denying. Her shoulders sag, her arms open, her lungs empty and she finally, finally sits down. 

“Regina?” It comes out breathy, awed, and she fears slightly needy. “Tell me more.”

***

... tbc...


End file.
